How Mint Beat Wesabe

I love getting this type of insight from someone that was there during such an important time for Mint.

A couple of questions:

Authority. We got thought leaders in personal finance to back us.

Can you give one or two examples of how you guys accomplished this?

Dave had a the killer idea of the content network (blog) which was a HUGE traffic generator and still is to this day.

Do you mean the Mint blog or were there others? If others, how many of them?

I like that you shared the apathy and Excel insights. I learned this early on too. Even today in the PF space, I'd still say that's true and shouldn't inhibit anyone from trying to create something cool.

Thanks for adding the PR point too. I get tired of hearing the "Mint didn't spend money to attract users" line.

this is a really great article and should be required reading for anybody thinking of starting up a company -- or considering joining a starup.

I think the domain name ( mint -vs- wesabe ) is responsible for more of the Mint victory than people want to admit. I know when I try and turn people on to new services, that seemingly petty little detail has been the primary reason whether they adopt it or not. That fact of life kills you inside when you put so much blood sweat and money into a company - only to have people talking about how to pronounce your name in blog comments rather than what cool stuff you can do.

It seems so simple. Yet I'm sure a lot of Marketing dudes get caught up in the hype that ends up being the "wrong community."

Say my customer is a bit of a laggard, What would you recommend doing to break through the traditional PR clutter in a very web 2.0 world? Is there a way to connect the two that makes sense and might provide value/ROI?

Thanks Noah.

Really good and insightful post. Looking forward to the design post though you mentioned.

Noah, excellent breakdown as usual. And I totally agree with your take (vs. Wesabe's post-mortem post).

I'm going to send your article to like a dozen people right now, that I preach this stuff to and don't believe me :)

fascinating. no one ever explained to me in the thread about why wesabe failed, how the freaking name is pronounced.

how much $ did wesabe raise? (I'm too lazy to go to crunchbase)

Very interesting article.